Abstract
In Chapter 3 I suggested that twentieth-century social scientists have generally considered place to be of relatively minor significance for understanding and explaining actions and events. One source of this attitude is our ability to control and manipulate our environments. This control has been manifested in several related ways — for example, in our abilities to minimize the effects of natural variation, overcome distance and create environments.1 Ironically, these same abilities have been factors in the recent reconsideration of the importance of place and region in social life. Scholars have come to recognize that the technical abilities involved in the manipulation of the environment seem to be poorly matched with the cultural narratives that connect an individual or group to an environment.2 This recognition has provided a degree of vindication to the geographer who has long maintained that human mastery over the environment alters, but does not diminish the importance of, human-environment relations.
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Notes
David Ley has characterized the modern, “post-industrial” city in terms of its separation of subject and object, which creates dehumanized landscapes that are linked to neither the individual nor the collective subject. David Ley, “Styles of the Times: Liberal and Neo-conservative Landscapes in Inner Vancouver, 1968–1986,” Journal of Historical Geography, vol. 13, 1987, pp. 40–56.
Robert David Sack, Human Territoriality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 90.
Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review, vol. 146, 1984, pp. 53–92
Paul Rabinow, “Representations are Social Facts: Modernity and Post-Modernity in Anthropology,” in James Clifford and George E. Marcus (eds) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 234–61
Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), pp. 10–75.
See, for example, Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of a Theory of Structuration (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984)
Mark Gottdiener, The Social Production of Urban Space (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985)
Derek Gregory and John Urry (eds) Social Relations and Spatial Structures (London: Macmillan, 1985)
John R. Logan and Harvey Molotch, Urban Fortunes: The Political Economy of Place (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987).
Edward W. Soja, “Regions in Context: Spatiality, Periodicity, and the Historical Geography of the Regional Question,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 3, 1985, pp. 175–90
Anne Gilbert, “The New Regional Geography in English and French-speaking Countries,” Progress in Human Geography, vol. 12, 1988, pp. 208–28.
G. A. Cohen, “Reconsidering Historical Materialism,” in Roland J. Pennock and J. W. Chapman (eds) Marxism (New York: New York University Press, 1983), pp. 227–51
An extensive literature exists concerning this topic. Reviews include Gordon L. Clark, “Capitalism and Regional Inequality,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 70, 1980, pp. 226–37
Stuart Holland, Capital versus the Regions (London: Macmillan, 1976)
Alain Lipietz, “The Structuration of Space, the Problem of Land, and Spatial Policy,” in John Carney, Ray Hudson and Jim Lewis (eds) Regions in Crisis: New Perspectives in European Regional Theory (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), pp. 60–75
Ann Markusen, Regions: The Economies and Politics of Territory (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1987).
For example, John Agnew has argued that: It is undeniable... that particular places within the United States have become less and less isolated from one another and the world-economy. However, a world-economy has always provided the backdrop for regional definition and interaction. Regions never did ‘define themselves,’ so to speak, in isolation from wider processes of economic and political interaction. Moreover, the impact of global and national processes has always been to create regional distinctiveness rather than to displace it. John Agnew, The United States in the World-Economy: A Regional Geography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 94.
Amos H. Hawley, Human Ecology: A Theoretical Essay (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 84.
Marshall Sahlins criticizes both the ecological and historical materialist arguments as examples of utility theories that reduce culture to a residual status: The utility theories have gone through many changes of costume, but always play out the same denouement: the elimination of culture as the distinctive object of the discipline [anthropology]. One sees through the variety of these theories two main types, proceeding along two different routes to this common end. One type is naturalistic or ecological — as it were, objective — while the second is utilitarian in the classic sense, or economistic, invoking the familiar means-ends calculus of the rational human subject. Marshall Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 101.
David Harvey, The Limits to Capital (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 390.
See, for example, Richard Peet, “The Destruction of Regional Cultures,” in R. J. Johnston and P. J. Taylor (eds) A World Crisis? Geographical Perspectives (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 150–72.
Neil Smith uses this vocabulary in noting that: The last hundred years of capitalist development have involved the production of space at an unprecedented level. But it has been accomplished not through absolute expansion in a given space but through the internal differentiation of global space, that is through the production of differentiated absolute spaces within the larger context of relative space. Neil Smith, Uneven Development (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), p. 88.
David Harvey, Consciousness and the Urban Experience: Studies in the History and Theory of Capitalist Urbanization (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 11.
N. J. Thrift, “No Perfect Symmetry,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 5, 1987, pp. 400–7
For a summary of this potential damage see David Harvey and Allen Scott, “The Practice of Human Geography: Theory and Empirical Specificity in the Transition from Fordism to Flexible Accumulation,” in W. MacMillan (ed.) Remodelling Geography (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), pp. 217–29.
Peter Jackson, Maps of Meaning: An Introduction to Cultural Geography (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), pp. 33–46.
Michael Storper, “The Post-Enlightenment Challenge to Marxist Urban Studies,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 5, 1987, pp. 418–26
Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959).
A. Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979), p. 207.
See also Anthony Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism: Vol. 1, Power, Property and the State (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 39–40.
Derek Gregory, “Postmodernism and the Politics of Social Theory,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 5, 1987, pp. 245–8
“Areal Differentiation and Post-Modern Human Geography,” in Derek Gregory and Rex Walford (eds) New Horizons in Human Geography (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 1–29.
Michael Dear, “The Postmodern Challenge: Reconstructing Human Geography,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, new series, vol. 13, 1988, pp. 262–74
Brian J. Whitton, “Herder’s Critique of the Enlightenment: Cultural Community Versus Cosmopolitan Rationalism,” History and Theory, vol. 27, 1988, pp. 146–68
Fred B. Kniffen, “Louisiana House Types,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 26, 1936, pp. 179–93
F. Kniffen, “Louisiana House Types,” p. 179; “The American Covered Bridge,” The Geographical Review, vol. 41, 1951, pp. 114-23, ref. on p. 114; “The Physiognomy of Rural Louisiana,” in H. J. Walker and M. B. Newton (eds) Environment and Culture (Baton Rouge: Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University, 1978), pp. 199–204
John C. Hudson, “North American Origins of Middlewestern Frontier Populations,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 78, 1988, pp. 395–413
John Shelton Reed, One South: An Ethnic Approach to Regional Culture (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), p. 6.
Wilbur Zelinsky, “North America’s Vernacular Regions,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 70, 1980, pp. 1–16.
D. W. Meinig, “The Continuous Shaping of America: A Prospectus for Geographers and Historians,” American Historical Review, vol. 83, 1978, pp. 1186–1205
James R. Shortridge, “The Emergence of ‘Middle West’ as an American Regional Label,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 74, 1984, pp. 209–20
Emanuel A. Schegloff, “Notes on a Conversational Practice: Formulating Place,” in David Sudnow (ed.) Studies in Social Interaction (New York: The Free Press, 1972), pp. 75–119.
Paul Carter presents an intriguing study of the contextual nature of the naming of places in his book The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
Richard Creese, “Objects in Novels and The Fringe of Culture: Graham Greene and Alain Robbe-Grillet,” Comparative Literature, vol. 39, 1987, pp. 58–73
E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961)
Donald M. Lowe, History of Bourgeois Perception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).
J. Duncan and N. Duncan, “(Re)reading the Landscape,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 6, 1988, pp. 117–26.
D. W. Meinig (ed.) The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979)
John Brinkerhoff Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984)
John R. Stilgoe, Common Landscapes in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982)
Denis Cosgrove and Stephen Daniels (eds) The Iconography of Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
Denis Cosgrove and Peter Jackson, “New Directions in Cultural Geography,” Area, vol. 19, 1987, pp. 95–101.
E. V. Walter, Placeways: A Theory of the Human Environment (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).
James Ogilvy, Many Dimensional Man: Decentralizing Self Society and the Sacred (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 124–5
Michael Perlman, Imaginai Memory and the Place of Hiroshima (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), p. 156.
Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness (London: Pion, 1976).
Joan H. Hackeling, “Authenticity in Preservation Thought: The Reconstruction of Mission La Purisima Concepcion,” unpublished MA thesis, Department of Geography, University of California, Los Angeles, 1989.
This is adapted from David Carr’s discussion of the relation of practical versus cognitive historical narratives. David Carr, Time, Narrative, and History (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1986), p. 171.
Yi-Fu Tuan, “Surface Phenomena and Aesthetic Experience,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 79, 1989, pp. 233–41
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© 1991 J. Nicholas Entrikin
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Entrikin, J.N. (1991). The Empirical-Theoretical Significance of Place and Region. In: The Betweenness of Place. Critical Human Geography. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21086-2_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21086-2_4
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